KEY POINTS:
Some teachers around the country have not received back pay, have been paid late or underpaid in a series of payroll blunders, according to the Secondary Principals' Council.
Council chairman Arthur Graves said he did not know the extent of the problem but said there were "significant problems with accuracy in the payroll process".
He said the problems were nationwide and had been compounded by the introduction of a new collective agreement and the Christmas period.
Datacom provides the teachers' payroll service under its contract with the Education Ministry.
Mr Graves believes the service is then sub-contracted out to three companies.
The Secondary Principals' Council was writing to the Ministry of Education and Mr Graves believed the ministry was "gathering a group" to discuss the problem.
"Heaps of things are going wrong ... and it can be very hard (for teachers) to unravel because the payslips don't have the information," Mr Graves told NZPA.
Four staff members from Hastings Boys' High School has been wrongly paid every week this year, Hawke's Bay Today reported.
"Generally they're underpaid, but sometimes it's their whole salary missing for two weeks," the school's principal Rob Sturch said.
Robin Duff of the Post Primary Teachers Association said his organisation had a number of concerns about the payroll.
He said the pay deal was a complex settlement that meant those looking after the payroll had to "program and reprogram... but that should not be an excuse."
"We have considerable concern about it but they are working very hard on it."
Education Ministry spokesman Iain Butler told Hawke's Bay Today 99 per cent of all teachers had been paid properly in the first pay round in February.
But with 65,000 changes made to the system at the start of this year "it's not unusual to have the odd mistake", he told the paper.
- NZPA
